Monday, January 26, 2015

The One Who Say's "Um"

Hey all!

This is the young Lady I baptized on Saturday, the one who said she wanted to be baptized by
´´the one who says ´um.´´

We dedicated the new chapel this week! President
Kuçeki came to dedicate it, and we got to have our interviews with him.
He is super cool. He gave us an awesome message about what we can do to
become sanctified missionaries during our district meeting too, it was pretty
awesome. We had a lot of baptisms right after the dedication too! I
can´t remember the exact number though. One of the Sister missionaries
investigators, a 9 year old girl, asked me to baptize her. When the
Sisters asked her who she wanted to baptize her she said ´´I want the one who
says ´um.´´´ That was pretty funny! I´ve been using a lot of filler
words lately while I´m thinking about how to conjugate verbs, so I´ve got to
nab that while I can.

Mom and Dad, I loved the E-mail you sent! I´m glad to
hear that Landon is doing well in Paraguay and that he´s working with the
missionaries down there! The Elder that he´s working with sounds pretty
cool. Tell him to send some pictures, I want to see what Paraguay´s
like! Does he have an E-mail where I can contact him directly? I´d
love to hear about how Paraguay´s going for him.

The thought what you shared about when Peter walked on water
to meet Jesus was so neat too.
You´re so right, a lot of times we scare
ourselves when we realize what we´re doing. Every now and then I ´´look
down´´ and see what it is that I´m doing, and it´s kind of terrifying.
I´ll be honest! But whenever I´m at those moments the Savior´s there
too. There is a very real power in the atonement of Jesus Christ
It´s something that´s tangible, that we can see taking action in our
lives if we´re applying it. I´ve seen and felt it in my life before and
am continuing to do so in the mission field.

I´m also sad to hear about Sister Johnson passing
away. She is an incredible person, and I´m sure that she and Skip are
busy working on the other side.

Okay, you also asked about how the octets going. It´s
going great! This is our last week in the octet. At the beginning
of February the assistants will be going back to Goiânia and Elder M. will probably be transferred. We´ve got a lot of work to do this week
though, so it´s a good thing that
we´ve still got them here. We have
several more families that we´re working with right now, and if all goes well
they´ll be baptized this Saturday! Wooh! The family that you were
talking about Dad, the one that we met that had been expecting us, is doing
great. They´re one of the families that is working towards baptism this
Saturday. They´re super firm and full of potential . It´s so
wonderful seeing people like that coming to the church here, we need them.

This picture I took right after the dedication of
the chapel.

The sun was setting right over the top of the chapel,

and the
clouds just lit up. It was pretty awesome!

When Mom was mentioning all of the stories that Dad shared
in Sacrament meeting, it reminded me of something that happened in the
MTC. Several Elders and I were swapping stories and I told them some of
the things that Dad´s done. Growing up in Capitol reef, raising horses,
living in a remote part of Alaska for 4 years, and other awesome stuff like
that. One of the Elders commented ´´Man. You´re Dad sounds like
the most interesting man alive!´´ I remember thinking ´´Yup! He
probably is!´´

The storms here can be
pretty crazy. We get way more lightning here than we do with the storms
in CA. I saw one storm in the distance a couple of weeks ago where there
was a lightning strike about every second (I timed them). The storm that
we had here in Itumbiara was pretty heavy too. When it rains here it
pours, but we love it :) I love it when it rains, and lightning just
looks awesome.

Congrats on getting you permit, Savannah! That´s so
awesome! Maybe you´ll help me get the hang of driving again when I get
back :) Keep practicing and always try to find something that you can do
better!

Congrats on nailing the job down and moving to Orem, Amy and
Trevor! That´s so awesome! Keep me up to date on how that goes.

I love you all! Have a wonderful week! I look
forward to reading all of your E-mails next Monday!